Eh, not worth recalibrating every vending machine in existence.
It’s why you do it by attrition. The machines break/wearout. Replace the coin units as that happens.
If I had any sway, we’d drop down to the dime and half-dollar. A dime 50 years ago is only worth a penny today. And with no other coins, they could resize the 50cent to something smaller.
Eliminating the penny, the average change transaction is 3 coins, with a max of 5. Dropping to just dime and 50cent, the average change is 2.8 coins. And we’d get rid of two of the most expensive coins to make (in cost/value).
In the meantime they only accept a fraction of nickels in circulation? No. Figure out how to keep them the same weight & size or don’t do it.
Nothing’s constant. The companies will figure out what works for them.
I don’t think the savings is worth the disruption. In 2024 the mint lost $2.6 million minting nickels. That’s not really that much compared to 7 million vending machines.
Especially when you don’t even have a cheaper formula in mind.
Something like this. Australian five-cent coin - Wikipedia
I’m proposing a massive shake up to US coinage. Similar to NZ’s back in 2004. New Zealand's new small change - Wikinews, the free news source
Drop the penny, change all the coins to cheaper to mint versions. Remove the $1 and $2 bills and replace with coins. The coins are expensive to mint today. They’ll only get more costly with time.
Personally, i do not like having coins instead of bills.
Is there some advantage besides personal preference? (And it could be i’m in the minority in preferring bills.)
Coins last longer and are cheaper to produce when accounting for lifespan. Coins also work better than bills when using vending machines and with inflation, vending machines are requiring higher payments that obligate using a large number of coins in the US. The convenience of higher denomination bills outweighs the cost advantage of going to coins for those notes.
Some of this is being resolved with the use of credit cards and tap to pay. Physical money is in a weird spot right now. People are switching to electronic payments and theoretically, many places could drop physical cash in the next decade or two. The problem is, everything goes to shit when the power is out. Further, people buy things they’d prefer various others didn’t know about, so we’re not willing to give up anonymous cash. Also, when you have a despot in charge of the country, people become less trustful of cash that’s easy for the government to replace/shutdown.
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Good post. To expand on your points:
- I can imagine Trump wanting his face on currency so reissuing coins and bills may happen.
- Musk wants a digital world so I see a push for reducing cash use.
- Shifting from income taxes to tariffs and sale taxes incentivizes the government to crack down on cash use as allows economic transactions outside the government’s reach.
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No shock here that the new administration is dropping defenses of abortion rights.
Not sure what the over / under is of months until mifepristone loses its FDA approval, but I’m going with under 12 months. Article source is super left, but contains reasonable analysis and links about why Makary’s science is bad.
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Abortion, Every Day has learned that the Trump administration is freezing close to $35 million in Title X funding that was set to be distributed tomorrow. This unprecedented move won’t just hit Planned Parenthood affiliates—it will impact multiple nonprofit organizations, including at least one that may have been targeted in retaliation for a lawsuit against the first Trump administration. Another group had millions in funding paused over a statement affirming their “commitment to addressing systemic racism.”
Remember, Title X is the nation’s only federal family planning program. It provides affordable reproductive health care—birth control, STI testing, cancer screenings—primarily to low-income and uninsured patients.
There’s no overstating the impact here: Title X is a safety net. Six in 10 women who visit a publicly funded clinic consider it their usual source of medical care; for four in 10, it’s their only source.
The justification for having the FDA review the mifepristone regulations is a high quality study:
The report in question, which was neither peer-reviewed nor published in a medical journal, claims to find a 22-times higher rate of serious complications from mifepristone than reported by the FDA. It calls on the agency to “further investigate the harm mifepristone causes to women” and “reconsider its approval altogether.”
It was released online in April by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank that says it promotes Judeo-Christian traditions. The center was on the advisory board of Project 2025, a right-wing policy initiative that appears to have informed many of President Donald Trump’s recent actions.
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The stupidity + heartless combo is breathtaking
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So wait, doesn’t this weaken the “health of the mother” exception that name-brand Pro-Lifers®️ are supposed to be okay with?
We’re removing the “health of the mother” exception. Now it’s only pregnancies resulting from rape and incest where it’s okay to “murder an innocent, living, ensouled pre-born human being.” I guess that’s where we’re moving the line to today.
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Thry care about the life of the mother, but only as far as prayer. She should die if it is God’s will. Let’s keep doctors out of this.
Stuff like this is what has me disillusioned with Pro-Life®️ as a name-brand movement. I think it did start our nobly as genuine promotion of a culture of life, but at some point the movement as a whole morphed into just another cult of power-hungry bitches. Not everyone is that way, but enough are that Pro-Life®️ as an official label no longer has any real meaning.